American People Echo Short-Term Credit Consumers By Demanding A Voice In Washington

November 16, 2016 | Consumer Credit Wire

On November 8, the American people voted to elect a president they viewed as a Washington outsider who would change a federal system run by an entrenched political class. The results of this election are the most tangible example of what the short-term lending industry has been saying for years: Washington elites are out of touch with the financial realities of hard-working Americans.

• “Trump turned the Democrats’ commendable embrace of diversity on its head to invoke the ‘Forgotten Man,’ winning over lunch-bucket Democrats overlooked by their party as well as bringing in new voters and energizing lapsed ones.” – John A. Quelch, Fortune
• “Whooping and hollering, and raging at Fox News for being slow to call the election for Mr. Trump, the many faces of Trumpdom gathered on election night in the shopfront headquarters of the Columbiana county GOP to celebrate with him. This is a place where the psyche of rust belt decline has had decades to sink in, a place of lost jobs in smokestack industries and coal mines — and a place where residents have been building a resentment for years against Washington and politics as usual.” – Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times
• “Many Trump supporters, drawn by their candidate’s dark vision of a lost and failing country that ‘I alone can fix,’ thought of themselves as a movement to restore greatness… That message — American jobs, America First, Fortress America — hit home with millions of people who have felt disconnected from, and disdained by, the elites for decades.” – Marc Fisher, Washington Post
• “Readers of this column will not be surprised that Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States. Not because he is a paragon of virtue or the ideal role model for our children, but because, as we have said for some time, he identified the issues that matter to the American people… The insurgent campaigns of Trump and Bernie Sanders, which together registered nearly twice as many votes as establishment candidate Clinton in the primaries, sent an unmistakable signal that voters want fundamental change in the way our country is run.” – Darrel Delamaide, MarketWatch

This same message of the Washington elite’s willful disregard for the people it claims to protect was echoed in a June 2016 op-ed by Dennis Shaul, the CEO of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA):

• “The CFPB … has prejudged an entire industry. It has proceeded with the unshakeable conviction that it is acting in the public interest because the bureau believes it understands customer needs better than the customers do.” – Dennis Shaul, USA Today

The outcome of the 2016 election amplifies what has been playing out in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) rulemaking for short-term lending. In crafting its flawed and harmful rule, the CFPB’s unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats have deliberately ignored, and sought to impose their will upon, millions of consumers around the country who seek access to short-term credit.

The CFPB must acknowledge the overwhelming repudiation of its heavy-handed and activist-driven agenda and immediately reconcile its blatant disregard for short-term credit consumers with this new reality.